The Doll Collection by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466851948
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

After and Back Before

by Miranda Siemienowicz

Kayna pulls herself to the top of the woven metal structure that is the uprooted base of a great, fallen spire. The bars that make up the monument are almost too hot to hold, and even her feet feel the heat through their rough wrappings of cloth. She shades her eyes with a grin. Across a deep, dry riverbed are the tallest standing ruins on the rubble plain. They are two brick shells on the far bank, one high and sharp, one low, long, and dome-topped: the church and the station building.

She climbs down and waits for Bel. When they were younger, before either had any responsibility in the commune, he would have been the one in front. He used to drag her up the sheer gully walls to lie in the dirt and look out across the endless, undulating rubble. This is the first time they have been more than a half day from the gully, and she hasn’t seen his back ahead of her since they left. Now she squats, watching the hot plains wind stir dust off the heaped debris until he finally reaches her side.

Bel kneels and unwraps the small cloth bundle at his hip. He offers her a strip of dry possum meat from their dwindling supply—all they could take unnoticed.

Kayna shakes her head. “I don’t want to get thirsty.”

He tucks the bundle away and runs a dusty hand through his short, ragged hair. “I thought we would have found water by now,” he says.

“I know.” She sees her own wry smile echoed on Bel’s face. Mrs. Mary had always told them they might as well have been identical. That as soon they could walk she would leave them naked just so she could tell them apart.

“You take her for this,” Bel says. He hands Kayna their small leather Smiling Face, just bigger than his fist. She cups the little doll’s head, runs her thumb over the twisted hair stitched through its curved lips.

“She won’t talk to me here,” says Kayna. “It’s full of dead things.”

He shifts his feet. “And she’ll talk to me? It’s been—”

“Months,” Kayna finishes. “I know.” She hooks the twine that is wound around its upswept hair through her belt. They stand.

Back before, there had been a bridge between the riverbanks. This has fallen in as a concave stretch of broken asphalt slabs. The brick bases of two sets of supports still rise from the silt. They cross the riverbed upstream from the bridge and scramble up a hillock of broken brick and pavers. Tall wooden and steel poles spear the ground here and there.

The face of the church is a gargantuan brick sheet, laced with narrow windows, each capped with a tightly curved arch. At one side of the facade, the needle-sharp spike of a spire rises. Its mate is fallen in, the base jutting up like a hollow stump. Between and beyond them, at the rear of the building, the third and largest spire still holds court over the rubble.

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